Abstract: This issue explores the regulation of sexual identities, reproductive practices, and commercial sex in a global context. The articles highlight the constraints that medicine, law, and community placed upon women; how conventional understandings of honor, femininity, and motherhood shaped their choices; and how regulation was met with resistance. The policing of women's bodies, sexual acts, and reproductive choices often occurred quite literally through the surveillance of law enforcement agencies and the punishments they administered through legal codes. Communities also policed women, attempting to impose historically contingent understandings of sexual respectability and heteronormative desire. The legal and ... Read More Keywords: Trials (Witchcraft); Intersexuality; Trials (Sodomy); Women, Igbo; Sex role; Masculinity; Childbirth; Women community health aides; Public health personnel; Allied health personnel; Pregnant women; Human reproduction; Women; Women textile workers; Wo PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: At the end of the sixteenth century, early modern Europe became more and more preoccupied with female same-sex acts.1 Authorities previously somewhat disregarded this crime—sodomy—due to the prevailing attitudes towards sexuality, which defined it in terms of actual penetration.2 Law and society consequently considered sodomy a masculine form of transgression and female sodomy attracted little attention in early modern writings.3 Around 1600 however, medical treatises increasingly commented upon female homoeroticism. The recent "rediscovery" of the clitoris caused an upsurge in spectacular stories about sudden sex changes and medical studies that linked female sodomites to hermaphrodism. In the context of the ... Read More Keywords: Trials (Witchcraft); Intersexuality; Trials (Sodomy); Women, Igbo; Sex role; Masculinity; Childbirth; Women community health aides; Public health personnel; Allied health personnel; Pregnant women; Human reproduction; Women; Women textile workers; Wo PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In the Ohafia villages, the only matrilineal communities among the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria, a British colonial officer G. I. Jones likened a 1906-built shrine he saw in one family compound in the 1930s to an "African Madame Tussaud's."1 Among the carved wooden figures housed within the shrine, Jones noted various hegemonic male and female ogaranya—people who embodied wealth-power masculinity through the accumulation of wealth in commodities and wealth in people.2 These wooden figures were displayed in an exclusively masculine communal meetinghouse (obu). The inclusion of women in sculptures and murals in obu houses reflected women's invasion of masculine spheres of social mobility under colonial rule.3 "It ... Read More Keywords: Trials (Witchcraft); Intersexuality; Trials (Sodomy); Women, Igbo; Sex role; Masculinity; Childbirth; Women community health aides; Public health personnel; Allied health personnel; Pregnant women; Human reproduction; Women; Women textile workers; Wo PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Childbirth is socially controlled in all societies. In no society is the process of pregnancy and parturition treated as simply a physiological process, untouched by a cultural context, prescriptions, proscriptions, and customary practices.The twentieth century saw an unprecedented shift in childbirth practices worldwide: the locus of birthing moved from home to the hospital, and professional medical personnel, rather than customary attendants and relatives, were responsible for the care of laboring women. Even in the absence of biological necessity, birth became the site of medical intervention, and communities increasingly viewed parturients as patients. In 1975, a physician writing to Social Science and Medicine ... Read More Keywords: Trials (Witchcraft); Intersexuality; Trials (Sodomy); Women, Igbo; Sex role; Masculinity; Childbirth; Women community health aides; Public health personnel; Allied health personnel; Pregnant women; Human reproduction; Women; Women textile workers; Wo PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Women across the Americas experienced increased public scrutiny of their reproductive lives during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Modernizing states began criminalizing practices like abortion, while urbanization, immigration, and changes in women's workforce participation pushed fertility control into the public consciousness. The Brazilian capital city of Rio de Janeiro presents one crucial case study for understanding how the uneven process of state expansion affected women's reproduction, and, in turn, how women negotiated these changes. Early twentieth-century Brazil experienced a shift from familial to state patriarchy during which women's sexual honor—and reproductive lives—became public ... Read More Keywords: Trials (Witchcraft); Intersexuality; Trials (Sodomy); Women, Igbo; Sex role; Masculinity; Childbirth; Women community health aides; Public health personnel; Allied health personnel; Pregnant women; Human reproduction; Women; Women textile workers; Wo PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: "All women worked, even when they had newborns.""I saw mothers who worked with infants on their laps and who were allowed to stop working sometimes to breastfeed the children."A 1935 study of working-class households in the city of São Paulo, Brazil found mothers in the early-industrial era "preferr[ed] not to work outside the home."3 Forty years later, the historians Louise Tilly and Joan Scott made a remarkably similar argument for mothers in nineteenth-century Europe: "When the income of her husband and children was sufficient for the family's needs, she left the labor force."4 Although scholars have used oral interviews to approach the "feelings, thoughts and opinions of the women [Tilly and Scott] studied," ... Read More Keywords: Trials (Witchcraft); Intersexuality; Trials (Sodomy); Women, Igbo; Sex role; Masculinity; Childbirth; Women community health aides; Public health personnel; Allied health personnel; Pregnant women; Human reproduction; Women; Women textile workers; Wo PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In 1969, several years after the inauguration of President Joaquín Balaguer in the Dominican Republic, a group of concerned citizens wrote to the secretary of the interior and begged for help with a particularly grave problem they were dealing with in their neighborhood.1 The one hundred plus signatures belonged to the "mothers and fathers" living in the neighborhood referred to as Calle París in the Dominican capital of Santo Domingo.2 The house located at number 114 was, they claimed, a "cabaret" frequented by "a great number of streetwalkers."3 What is remarkable about this letter is not necessarily its reference to prostitution or even the large number of signatures. Rather these citizens were most concerned ... Read More Keywords: Trials (Witchcraft); Intersexuality; Trials (Sodomy); Women, Igbo; Sex role; Masculinity; Childbirth; Women community health aides; Public health personnel; Allied health personnel; Pregnant women; Human reproduction; Women; Women textile workers; Wo PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: Echoing Karl Marx, evoking Michel Foucault, and channeling early radical and 1970s socialist feminism, Judy Walkowitz in Prostitution and Victorian Society looked anew at the Contagious Diseases Acts (CDA) of mid-Victorian Britain, the experts and reformers who debated them, and the prostitutes who sought to earn a living in their shadow. It is not only that Prostitution and Victorian Society showed how to "study class and gender relations" together or that Walkowitz drew upon Foucault to chart governmentality, biopower, and sexual regulation through discourses, particularly those of medicine (vii). She also concretely explored "how sexual and social ideology became embedded in laws, institutions, and social ... Read More Keywords: Trials (Witchcraft); Intersexuality; Trials (Sodomy); Women, Igbo; Sex role; Masculinity; Childbirth; Women community health aides; Public health personnel; Allied health personnel; Pregnant women; Human reproduction; Women; Women textile workers; Wo PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: In the past two decades, governments, international organizations, nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and scholars have paid a great deal of attention to the issue of human trafficking. The "U.N. Protocol to Prevent, Suppress & Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women & Children" (the Palermo Protocol) defined human trafficking for the first time in international law in 2000. The term had been used only loosely throughout the twentieth century. The Palermo Protocol obligates its signatories (169 countries have ratified it) to take active measures to combat human trafficking in all of its forms. That same year, the United States passed the "Trafficking Victims Protection Act," and since then it has ... Read More Keywords: Trials (Witchcraft); Intersexuality; Trials (Sodomy); Women, Igbo; Sex role; Masculinity; Childbirth; Women community health aides; Public health personnel; Allied health personnel; Pregnant women; Human reproduction; Women; Women textile workers; Wo PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
Abstract: The Journal of Women's History editors and editorial staff thankfully acknowledge the generous contributions of the following scholars who reviewed manuscripts for the Journal, 3 September 2016–29 August 2017.Jeffrey AdlerSanjam AhluwaliaAnn AllenGulhan BalsoyNicole Elizabeth BarnesJoanna BartowAgatha BeinsEdith BenkovBrett BerlinerKeisha BlainEileen BorisTatiana BorisovaAnn BraudeMary C. BrennanGavin BrockettNikki BrownBarbara CaineD'Ann CampbellBarry CarrTamar CarrollJacqueline CastledineKristin CelelloLee ChambersHoward ChiangPatricia ClavinXiaoping CongDenise CruzHeather CurtisRebecca DavisFrancisca de HaanNara DillonFae DussartTanya EvansElyssa FaisonAshley FarmerAmy E. FarrellElaine FarrellDurba GhoshLawrence ... Read More Keywords: Trials (Witchcraft); Intersexuality; Trials (Sodomy); Women, Igbo; Sex role; Masculinity; Childbirth; Women community health aides; Public health personnel; Allied health personnel; Pregnant women; Human reproduction; Women; Women textile workers; Wo PubDate: 2018-01-09T00:00:00-05:00
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